What does that mean? It means that an expansion pack is the fastest selling PC game of all time. Oh, except that doesn’t change anything. Previous fastest-selling title was, well, Wrath Of The Lich King, which sold 2.8mil on day one. Apparently over 15,000 people attended Cataclysm launch events across the world, and the subs base for the game now sits and 12 million. It’s still an amazing thing, given that I can remember people tutting sceptically over Blizzard spending all their money on making that game in the first place. The lesson here is: don’t bet against Blizzard.

Maybe it comforts you, to remember “argumentum ad populum”. The fact that many people saying something doesn’t make it true. And many people liking something turned out to be a good indicator for something being pretty bad nowadays. (Trough the fact, that most people are by definition only average, and not above average. And the experience that dumb people generally are louder, which biases things downwards.)

I mean the fact that fantasy is preferred over sci-fi, which was not the case in the less desperate times and places, but was very much the case in the most dark ages and lands, should tell you something…

Actually, they can’t! Well, at least if you have the most basic idea of how the human psyche works, anyway.

You can acknowledge that someone else finds something good for reasons that are unfathomable to you, and respect that there is some worth there in order for people to like it. But you really can’t say in any amount of honesty that you think something is good but that you don’t like it.

In fact, the other night, watching the X-Factor. I commented to a friend that whilst I respect that Rebecca has talent and worth, and that many people like her for it, she wasn’t my favourite and I couldn’t appreciate her as being good because her voice and songs weren’t at all to my taste. So subjectively, she was kind of bad as far as I was concerned, even painfully so at points.

How about this? Find something you don’t like, saaay… I don’t know… I really don’t. Another thing I don’t like is rap and country music. Find something like that, and try to say that it’s actually really good. You can’t because you don’t truly believe that. Taste is subjective.

So because I don’t like something can mean that it’s brain-rottingly awful to me. That doesn’t apply to anyone else, and YMMV. I can accept that other people will find that thing good, but I can’t say that something is good and that I don’t like it in the same breath. Not honestly, anyway. Not without lying.

The human mind will always try to push its own agenda. It’s a survival aspect. And by the same merit I wish I could tattoo ‘JUST BECAUSE I LIKE SOMETHING, IT DOESN’T MEAN IT ISN’T ABSOLUTELY HORRIBLE’ to the insides of your eyelids, too. Not that I have any motivation to do so, nor do I believe the veracity of that sentence, I’m just making a point.

My favourite example are The Smiths. An awesome band, but I can’t listen to their music. Why? Morissey’s style of singing. It makes me want to stab my ears (not in all songs, though). But frontman’s singing voice does not a band make. It does mean, however, that I won’t be listening to them in my spare time.

It’s a linguistic problem, Wulf. Like ‘love’. I love cheese and tomato toasted sandwiches. But not in the same way I love my wife. There’s a clear but linguistically invisible distinction between ‘good’ meaning ‘what I like’ and ‘good’ meaning ‘possessing of quality’.

So ‘good’ means both ‘good to me’ and ‘good in an abstract for all time way’. And like it or not, public approbation is at least partially relevant to the latter. Also relevant is the sort of thoughtful analysis you get on this site all the time (including, amazingly, the comments on this thread) and most important of all, whether people are still talking about it ten years later.

Taking a step back, the problem with ‘if I don’t like it then it’s shit and somehow the fact that lots of other people do like is proof that it’s shit BECAUSE MACDONALDS’ is that it’s an arrogant refusal to empathise.

Though I suppose people doubtless get some weird nerdy emotional validation out of it so good for them. They weren’t fooled! Ha!, goes their bitter little laugh in the face of The Man!

I mean I hate fish, but does that mean that fish is not a tasty food group? That it cannot be delicious?

I fell off my wagon a few weeks ago, and have since been run over by several other wagons, and I don’t think I’ll ever be able to get back on my wagon ever again.

Cataclysm is much too good. Where WoW “addiction” always felt compulsive before, now I actually want to play WoW and am happy to spend my time doing so. They made it enjoyable enough that I don’t feel guilty spending a couple of hours every night in Azeroth.

@ frymaster Actually they could if they got involved with the beta test for the expansion as I did. There must have been plenty of people who did, because the servers were absolutely crawling with players when I was on there.

There are quite a few changes to how quests in general play out. Much more flash, cut-scenes, in general even low level quests have a much more heroic epic feel to them. Even the kill 5 rats ones are somehow generally better.
I think the absolute best part of it is dungeons are once again hard. In wrath any mouth breather could zone into a dungeon then bang his head into his keyboard for 10 minutes and look up to find himself decked out in purplez. Now if your not paying attention, and using all your class utilities you will simply wipe over and over and over. Normal modes are about as tough as ICC 10, heroic modes can make some of the toughest raid bosses seem like pussy cats.
Upping the difficulty did piss a number of people off, but on the other hand it has driven away a chunk of the short bussers that wont be missed.

Then to balance out the awesomeness they added a slew of new time sinks to irritate me.

Sure they could have. Cataclysm’s been in beta for months. I mean, I specifically didn’t even apply to be a beta-tester because I knew perfectly well I’d want the expansion anyway and didn’t want to spoil the experience by running it in a beta, no-progress-is-permanent fashion. But plenty of people were in it that weren’t me.

It looked like a fantastic release, with oodles of events in the month leading up to actual launch.

Makes me a bit jealous. I couldn’t ever really get into WoW, but I wish there were more developers out there who could put similar amounts of effort into creating a living world (hopefully one that I would be interested in)

Unless you forgot your account info just do what these other guys said and download it. Even if you forgot though you can call up Blizzard and most likely recover it with your name, address, and credit card.

Even if you have forgotten your information (all of it) you can just phone the free supportline, answer a question or two and they’ll tell you it over the phone. Takes about 10 minutes; I had to do it.

Now that you’ve shovelled like 100GB up and down your harddrive, actually _you_ should make it worth it. Problem being: Sooner or later you’ll realize games without ending will always leave you disappointed.
No matter how marvellous the first time I reached Darkshore was: You can never bring back the first kiss, the first girl. And every girl after her will just be a fading picture in the mirror in comparison to her. And if you stayed with her, sooner or later she’d become her own fading picture in the mirror.
So don’t try it again. It will only leave you feeling aged and bitter. And perhaps even alone though in company.

“You can never bring back the first kiss, the first girl. And every girl after her will just be a fading picture in the mirror in comparison to her. And if you stayed with her, sooner or later she’d become her own fading picture in the mirror. So don’t try it again. It will only leave you feeling aged and bitter. And perhaps even alone though in company.”

Well you can buy the first 3 for $20 total, and Cataclysm is 40 so….
Ya for the first month it costs the same as the last 2 or 3 games I bought and played for one week then beat/got bored of.

If you have an on again off again thing with MMO’s buy guild wars. No monthly fee, they never wipe your account for any reason, and it’s a really good game to boot. Buy it on steam and it even saves your account info for when you get an itch and reinstall.

I stopped playing WoW once I did most things at end game. After watching new seasons of PvP gear come out right after I finished a set, and new raid content come out making everything of mine obsolete, I just said to heck with it. I realize they have to advance and make new stuff to replace the old, but my main beef was that you were not viable at ALL for later content unless you upgraded your gear. The game is just too gear based for me. A bad player decked out in top tier gear will always be better than a great player who has crap gear. Skill means very little. It only comes into play when you have players in the same level of gear. Anybody else can’t even pitch in.

There seem to be a lot of people who haven’t played WoW in years taking the opportunity to get back in and start over with a new character too, and most of the feedback I’ve heard from them has been very positive. I could easily see that subscription number creeping up some more yet. Real smart move from Blizzard to overhaul the early content to entice the WoW quitters back in all over again.

I probably won’t go back to it -because there’s just so much other stuff I want to play- but it’s the first time I’ve been genuinely tempted to go back to WoW. I never thought that would happen.

Well, back in October they announced they had 12 million subscribers and that number referred to accounts that were active at the time of that announcement (not trial accounts or free promotional subscriptions, expired or cancelled subscriptions, or expired prepaid cards).

The expansion wasn’t out in Asia until December 9th. Of those 12 million subscribers just under half are in Europe or the US so over half of those who could possibly buy the expansion on day one did. That sounds quite reasonable to me, not everyone can get these things the moment they come out.

I have seen the payment model they use in Asia, it blows me away that it’s so popular there!
They charge by time played. Considering how much of my playtime is spent sitting on my dragon flapping in the air afk, likely 60%of the time I would be paying for would be doing absolutely nothing interesting. Like paying for time at a paintball palace then hanging out in the bathroom for most of it.

If I was to download the 10 day trial would I have acess to the Cataclysm area’s or are they strictly for high level players?
Only ask as I’m interested in seeing the changes done to the area’s the uh last time i played the trial

I started a new account from scratch a few weeks back, after the Cataclysm hit. I recently moved from the UK to NZ, so decided to start again rather than suffer the lag and timezone differences on the EU servers.

The Cataclysm changes are very, very noticeable from the word go. Every start zone I’ve played has been changed quite significantly, all for the better, and the way each class plays at low levels has changed too (mostly with the change to the Talent system, but also abilities are gained at different times, hunters start with pets, etc).

So yeah, grab the trial, but if you do, expect to be handing over your credit card details a few days later.

I’m really quite curious to play this, even though I never got past level 50ish in the past, but I don’t think I really can these days, now that I’m working instead of studenting. It would essentially mean not playing any other games for ages to have the time to play it, and I have about a million things I want to play.

As a recurring ‘quitter’ of wow, this isn’t enough to get me involved in the game again. I’m more interested in the content from level 1-58 than in the content from 80-85. I don’t give a rats arse about Goblins and think Horde should have had the Worgen because worgen are actually cool. Also the talent trees look utterly retarded. It seems there’s fuck all room for anything but cookie cutter builds. Colour me curious, but I’m done with WoW. To start up again would be letting myself down and I would have a nightmare reconfiguring my UI from scratch.

If you’re not interested in Cataclysm because you’re only interested in the 1-58 game, you’re either trolling or haven’t paid the least attention to the expansion. Reworking the old world is THE ENTIRE POINT.

Well, not really. I mean, there’s been a massive amount of 1-60 change that’s well worth a look, but the expansion isn’t required for 90+% of that. You’re getting the 80-85 zones, archaeology, the new races, etc for your expansion buck.

Do you need Litch King to play this? I would buy it too but there I’ve only ever gotten a mage up to level 40 and I just don’t know if it’s worth all the grinding to get up to 80 and start enjoying the new stuff. I suspect there is plenty new stuff for me to do at the lower levels but the end game stuff always seems so far away.

Standard WoW gets you acess to the Azerothian zones that are Old but recently destroyed. You can level from 1-60.
Burning crusade adds the ability to make Blood Elf and Draenai characters and you can level from 61-70 in Outland.
Wrath of the Lich King gets you the ability to create Death Knight classes when you have a character on your account (or realm) of level 55 or higher. You can also level from 71-80 in the Icy continent of Northrend.
Which means, finally, that Cataclysm grants you the option to create Goblin and Worgen characters and level your characters from 81-85 in then newly unlocked areas of Azeroth.
Actual current wow players should correct me on discrepancies.

Also as an edited afterthought, if you find any of the ‘required’ content in the game ‘grindy’ then this isn’t the game for you. As I remember it, playing the game was intrinsically enjoyable, regardless of the fact that I was supposedly ‘grinding’ for badges, xp or honour; the very process of it was entertaining for me. If it isn’t for you, then you are putting yourself through an act of masochism for a kind of holy grail (end game) that may well not be worth it. But with all that time invested, that’s now how one may rationalize it. In other words, the carrot on the stick will always be far away, so you better enjoy the journey.

Good question. You wouldn’t have access to Outlands (if you don’t have Burning Crusade either), and no access to Northrend, which would make leveling up to 80 a real pain in the ass. But if you’re starting from scratch that wouldn’t matter much. Just get Burning Crusade when you get to the appropriate level, then Wrath of the Lich King after that.

Each expansion has also added a profession you can’t learn without that expansion – jewelcrafting for TBC, inscription for Wrath, archaeology for Cata. You also can’t learn how to fly in the old world without the expansions (flying mount requires BC, Azeroth flying requires Cata).

Actually that’s not true. For WotLK the professions were patched into the game before the expansion was out. For instance, incsription and glyphs were available to everybody. That’s probably only true for WotLK because if I recall for TBC you could only get jewelcrafting in the new starter areas for Draenei and Blood Elves, or in Outlands.

But at least for Wrath they tossed all of that in there beforehand. What you got was the ability to go to Northrend and level to 80, and make a Death Knight if you bought the expansion.

Man, man. I just… I just don’t know anymore. Is this what the kids like these days?

WoW just sorta launched at just the right time to snag the market and now it’s got all the momentum of a ten mile long gravy train hurtling it inexorably forwards. Also it’s a steam engine. And they stoke it with hundred dollar bills.

Well it helps that it’s actually a really fun game. I was in the “hate wow” camp for a long time until I decided to give it a shot. It’s hard not to be impressed with the polish, art style, sounds, game mechanics and the general fun and accesssibility of it all. Coming from EVE online myself it’s quite painful to see that game not living up to it’s full potential. I don’t mean it should be a wow in space but the game can definately use a dose of accessible fun and polish all around. Even the supposed “endgame” in EVE (0.0) ends up being more boring than some of the lesser quests, dungeons, bg’s in wow.

My impression of it (which is not probably worth much, seeing as I never got to the endgame) was that it was good but not great, if you know what I mean. That is to say, while not substantially better than the many competitors it has left in the dirt, it is most certainly not worse. But something’s gotta come out on top, right? And once there there’s a lot keeping it there.

Great to see it do well; this is WOW’s biggest expansion pack ever, and despite some major reservations I have about it – very linear questing in the 80-85 zones and some of the revamped ones – it’s also the best. I’m having so much fun playing it again.

Amazing, its really amazing to see that 6 years later this games still outsells every other MMORPG, but wait thats not a compliment. Its nerds like red shirt guy that feeds the Two-Head Monster called Blizzard-Activision, thus in a not-so-long future we will pay fee for the privilege to pay fee to buy a license for a game.

WoW is a huge hit because of perfect timing. Was it really original? Not really, but it got most things right and made MMO’s more casual and accessible. In a time when you had EQ, DAoC, and whatnot, WoW was a lot more newbie friendly. Because of that, it attracted non-MMO players, which on top of the people who always played MMO’s beforehand, contributed to a huge player base. Player base is everything. If nobody is playing, everybody is going to leave. That’s why they call it “Massively Multiplayer”. Aside from that however, Blizzard’s name alone was already a juggernaut after the Warcraft, Diablo, and Starcraft games. Bioware had a similar opportunity with TOR, but they are squandering it by making a “me too” WoW style game.

WoW’s success can’t be duplicated again, unless someone comes out with something completely amazing and revolutionary in a time when all we have is a bunch of WoW clones, or games that try to be unique but fail horribly in execution. I can’t for the life of me think what that might be. Well, I have some dream MMO ideas, but those are never going to happen.

The launch was exceedingly smooth, from what i saw: no server queue, respawn rates were very fast, there wer e a couple bugged quests in one area (Vash’jir). Other than that, in a guild with 25 on at the same time, no complaints.
Plus, exploring ancient Egyptian ruins with ‘Harrison’ (Indiana) Jones was hilarious.

I played WoW a couple of years back with a free trial, pre any expansions. I think I was a paladin. I remember having to go and kill 12 of something for someone. Rats maybe. Then go to a field somewhere nearby and get 10 of something else. Barrels of apples? Can’t remember.

I got the original WoW on a month’s subscription just to see what all the fuss was about, and what I played was fantastic. I ended with a level 39 Paladin and some good memories, I was just unwilling to pay a monthly sub. The bit I most enjoyed about the game however was just exploring, and for those like me I guess the big changes in Cataclysm may well reignite what we loved most about WoW.

I enjoy playing WoW, I’ve got a few level 80s and am working my way through to 85 right now. However this expansion seems pretty narrow to me. First its only 5 levels which they have lengthened by the amount of XP required per level, but it’s also much more of a single player focus game. I’m nearly 84 now and I’ve only encountered one dungeon. The gameplay itself is also narrow, the narrative is so defined that running additional characters through the expansion isn’t going to yield any new options for advancement.

Really to me this expansion pushes the genre farther away from an MMO style and more into a single player game with attached chat room.

I tried grouping with people and its pointless all the quests are so easy that they get accomplished before you even get a feel for whats going on. The game is actually more confusing when played with a group. I liked having multiple paths for advancement it gave me an incentive to bring other characters through and follow different narratives. I’m not really excited about visiting the same single player story over and over again with Cat.

I’m having fun on the once through but I don’t think personally this expansion lives up to MMO standards. It’s dumbed down yet again.

I strongly agree. World of Chatcraft as a game is child’s play (literally). The challenge comes exclusively from voluntarily seeking out difficult or heroic-mode tasks in the game to complete. Blizzard intends this.

Don’t expect the game to push you into challenging situations. It won’t. You have to make those situations yourself! You have to kill 12 boars? Try killing 9 at once. You’re gathering 10 apples? Kill every opposing faction you see while doing it. Doing a dungeon or raid? Get the achievements and try heroic mode.

1. Tedious run from point X to point Y (CoH at least made this fun)
2. Kill Enemy by pressing 1, 3, 1, 4, 2, a lot in a prescribed order to max DPS.
3. Repeat 2 until enough enemies have been killed/hat’s found/boar livers collected.
4. Tedious Run back to point X (Alternatively use magic stone/diary/pamplet/hat to teleport home)

And that, is basically that. I have liked:

1. The travel powers of CoH
2. The setting of WoW & WH (They are the same after all)
3. The Henchman of CoH (I don’t play as much as my friends)
4. The storytelling in quests of D&DO

I’m a RPG gamer primarily (With a lot of strategy and some racing and shooters thrown in) but i find the quests and combat so bloody dull, i don’t know how anyone can play it for hours at a time :(.

1, 2, 4, 3, 1, 3, 1, 7! Oooh, i got a bat eye for that potion recipe, only 73 more left to collect…

> And that, is basically that. I have liked:
>1. The travel powers of CoH
>2. The setting of WoW & WH (They are the same after all)
>3. The Henchman of [Guild Wars] (I don’t play as much as my friends)
>4. The storytelling in quests of D&DO

Sounds to me like you’d be better off playing Warcraft 3 or (with a bit of setting flexibility) Dragon Age than bother with all the overhead of an MMORPG.

Yeah, i’ve been playing Dragon Age recently after hating it for a while.. My friend told me to turn off all the allied AI and suddenly it became fun. Pity i have to do the annoying single hero fade mission at the moment…

I’d love to play an MMO with decent strategic combat though.. And i’d love an MMOCCG.. Every fight is a card game and you earn cards by defeating enemies, not buying packs… That’s a perfect game, right there…

Of course Catalysm sold 3.3m on day one. As far as the largest body of mainstream gaming players are concerned, the PC only runs one game, and World of Warcraft is it. (Followed shortly by the second largest body which thinks the Call Of Duty series is it.) Real gamers who have had enough EverQuest clones for one lifetime can only pontificate in the direction of the spectacle.

With Cataclysm, Blizzard have again proved why they’re the leader in the MMO field. Cataclysm is stunningly good, from the updated mechanics to the insanely good artwork. Sorry, other games, looks like you’ll be sitting in the “unplayed” pile for a while longer…

It would be fun to replay the game again purely to float about just looking at things, as I spent some time doing in Northrend. I’ve always enjoyed how accurately Blizzard deal with texturing. There are almost zero points in the entire game where a brick texture is misaligned as it joins another wall or a trim doesn’t match up as it progresses around an arch.

There’s probably one guy on the WoW team that would be really pleased that someone noticed all his hard work.